I do not know much about rivers.

In the late 1940s Americans began afresh to confront—slowly, partially, and often reluctantly—the discrepancy between their ideals of equality and justice, and the reality of how they treated certain traditionally despised classes of people. There was, it seems not too grand to say, a broad, mild but insistent cultural pressure toward these confrontations, deriving its force from anti-racist propaganda of the war effort and from civil rights organizations as well as, perhaps, from the general experience of war, in which so many different kinds of Americans had been thrown into service with so many others. Sometimes these confrontations were ugly, but sometimes they were formidably thoughtful, as in the case of An American Dilemma or Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Out of this same culture, somewhere between Myrdal and Kinsey, appeared a small Partisan Review essay by Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” swiftly touring American literature in an effort to confront these same themes.

Or rather, this one theme, Fiedler said.

[T]he fact of homosexual passion contradicts a national myth of masculine love, just as our real relationship with the Negro contradicts a myth of that relationship; and those two myths with their betrayals are, as we shall see, one.

One? Yes, one. Just look at what were then regarded as the great works of American literature, all of them—Huckleberry Finn, the Leatherstocking tales, Moby Dick, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway—overwhelmingly boys’ books, as Papa’s short-story collection frankly admitted.

“As boys’ books,” Fiedler wrote, “we should expect them shyly, guiltlessly as it were, to proffer a chaste male love as the ultimate emotional experience—and this is spectacularly the case.”

At the focus of emotion, where we are accustomed to find in the world’s great novels some heterosexual passion, be it “platonic” love or adultery, seduction, rape, or long-drawn-out flirtation, we come instead on the fugitive slave and the no-account boy lying side by side on a raft borne by the endless river toward an impossible escape, or the pariah sailor waking in the tattooed arms of the brown harpooner on the verge of their impossible quest.

Fiedler believed “we are, though vaguely, aware” of the homoeroticism in these stories.1 But, he said, it appeared to have escaped Americans’ notice that not only were the great books of the canon about the chaste manly mutual love of men for men, which they could find by escaping to the great outdoors where women didn’t go, but about the chaste manly mutual love of a white man for—as Fiedler put it, in 1948-speak—“a colored.”

In the myth, one notes finally, it is typically in the role of outcast, ragged woodsman, or despised sailor (“Call me Ishmael!”), or unregenerate boy (Huck before the prospect of being “sivilized” cries out, “I been there before!”) that we turn to the love of a colored man….

Our dark-skinned beloved will take us in, we assure ourselves, when we have been cut off, or have cut ourselves off, from all others, without rancor or the insult of forgiveness. He will fold us in his arms saying, “Honey” or “Aikane”; he will comfort us, as if our offense against him were long ago remitted, were never truly real. And yet we cannot ever really forget our guilt; the stories that embody the myth dramatize as if compulsively the role of the colored man as the victim….

In each generation we play out the impossible mythos, and we live to see our children play it: the white boy and the black we can discover wrestling affectionately on any American sidewalk, along which they will walk in adulthood, eyes averted from each other, unwilling to touch even by accident. The dream recedes; the immaculate passion and the astonishing reconciliation become a memory, and less, a regret, at last the unrecognized motifs of a child’s book. “It’s too good to be true, Honey,” Jim says to Huck. “It’s too good to be true.”

Fiedler expanded on this essay in Love and Death in the American Novel, ascribing, I think it’s fair to say, Americans’ literary obsessions to a kind of cultural immaturity. But his insights might have more to do with that moment in the late 1940s when those books became the unarguably great American books, when they surpassed the palefaces Irving and Howells and James and Eliot and Wharton, enshrining as supremely normal a thinly disguised marginal America, ridden with guilt and driven by id, whose great book’s secret motto was “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil!”

1Vaguely? From Moby Dick: “Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, –Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!”

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24 comments

Is this the place for a round of Humiliation? I’ve never managed to read Huck. I don’t know whether I could articulate the difficulty, but I’ve found it much less inviting than, say, Moby-Dick (and apparently I missed the school year in which we were made to read it).

1. Faulkner is conspicuous by his absence from that list of slashy great American novels. I am prepared to argue that he takes it to the next stage (ahem): not only are the white and colored man bound homosocially and homosensually together , but they are *brothers*.

2. Since the Civil Rights Era, such novels have become much less common and canonical.

3. The trope is still current in TV and movies, from “I, Spy” to “Psych”, though it is not dominant.

4. When fans (mostly women) write slash fan fiction about buddy shows, it is invariably the case that shows with interracial buddies get much less fanfic than almost identical shows where both buddies are white. Example: “I, Spy” (fanfic is rare) compared to “The Man from UNCLE” (one of the oldest ongoing slash fandoms).

5. If you do not read that Ishmael/Queequeeg scene as sexy, UR DOIN IT RONG.

I tried to suggest that we could include a passage from that chapter of Moby-Dick at our wedding, and was firmly rebuked.

Any of you naysayers on Eric’s reading should know that Melville makes pretty clear earlier in the novel that the sperm in question is called that because of its close resemblance to the “quickening humor.” There’s also the chapter that describes how the skin of the whale’s penis is used as a kind of poncho.

(On a separate note, I was watching an episode of the BBC series “Life of Mammals” with my son to find it concluded with some fairly astonishing scenes of whale, er, courtship. Let’s just say that it was graphic enough that it gave me a new understanding of that chapter of the novel.)

What, you had to wait until the sperm-squeezing passage? The end of chapter 10 wasn’t explicit enough for you?

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg — a cosy, loving pair.”

I do not think that the Leatherstocking Tales had to wait until the late ’40s to become influential American books.
And for boys’ tales, women played a pretty large role in them, especially if you include _Home As Found._

But his insights might have more to do with that moment in the late 1940s when those books became the unarguably great American books

It seems like a lot of weight is on the “unarguably” here, because Van Doren’s The American Novel (link should go to the Melville chapter) was published in 1921, Lawrence’s Studies in American Literature (Chapter 10, Chapter 11) in 1923, and Mumford’s Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision in 1929. So Melville, at least, arguably became unarguably great in the 1920s. This isn’t to say that Fiedler’s championing of them in the late ’40s and ’50s isn’t also significant, but that significance would have more to do with how he needled the established canon into saying things the tightly wound would rather it didn’t.

the poetry of Whitman, whose name I’m surprised has yet to come up in this thread

Likely because there was no secretly gay Whitmanian underbelly to expose. That aspect of his work had been a part of the public discussion of his poetry since the first edition of Leaves was published. His contemporaries strained to turn homoerotic statements into patriotic ones, and were almost uniformly unsuccessful.

I have to teach it once a year, actually. Seriously: when I arrived in 2001, he’d just had his first ever consecutive losing seasons. I read in the local paper that he’d responded by reading Moby Dick during the offseason. When I was invited to a postgame dinner at his house (along with 50 other people, sitdown dinner, not catered, pretty amazing affair) I asked him about this, and about the rumor that his favorite poet is Virgil. I got a snappy answer to the latter (“yeah! he’s one of ours!”) and, eventually, a slap to the back of the head from the Melville discussion. It didn’t have anything to do with Melville — it had to do with the fact that I’d brought a roll of hockey-sox tape to the dinner, at Sue’s request, so that I could tape one of his car’s rear-view mirrors. Sue had complained that Joe had taped it with masking tape, which, of course, obscured the view. OK, it’s a long story. But at the end of it is a head-slap from Mr. Paterno himself, along with his proclamation that I was a “wise guy” who “would be trouble.”

Bumbling back late into this discussion: it seems to me that Fiedler is not canonizing these books (as SEK says, that had already been done, and Cooper was in any case ripe for decanonization), nor is he surveying the theme of the gay — he’s saying “hey, this subset of our canonical works trades in these two diversely uncomfortable themes, which I note is no coincidence.”

Does the spelling “ag’in” presume a standard pronunciation “agayn”? Or is it an “inaudible provincialism”?

And is Virgil “one of ours” in the sense of being like Paterno a dealer in simulacra of combat, or just Italian?

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg — a cosy, loving pair.

The first time I read this I found it pretty hard to confine the passage to “confidential disclosures between friends.” Something more was going on between the “despised sailor” and the “noble savage.”

Even better. My only regret is that I did not have sufficient wit, at the time, to quote Saturday Night Fever and say, “hey! don’t hit my hair!” I had to settle for “I don’t bring my hockey-sox tape to just anyone, you know.”